This caught my attention from Meta-Douglasp. From the home page…

I don’t know who these people are, but How To Rockstar just wrote up my blog with a very nice review (thanks guys, I see you got the check I sent).

The United States is like your family, it’s got its problems and can seem dysfunctional at times, but you gotta love it, and it sure beats being in some of them other countries.

It’s an odd quirk of our taste for “round” numbers that we tend to celebrate milestones that are multiples of a power of ten. For example, a 10th anniversary is somehow more significant than a 6th anniversary. Likewise, a 100th post is more significant than a 73rd post.

I’m not sure if this is common knowledge, but you can place template parameters in your SQL scripts and evaluate them within query analyzer. I think I learned this one a long time ago from a former fantastic SysAdmin, turned DBA, turned Developer, Tyler.

In an effort to cut down on the bandwidth used by RSS feeds, Subtext implements the RFC3229 for feeds as proposed by Bob Wyman.

In a previous post I mentioned a problem I was having with implementing RFC3229. Well I got that one fixed, but realized that I had another very subtle bug. One that is potentially encouraged by the examples in the spec.

From the title of his post, Dream Hangovers, I thought Robb was going to tell some story about another night of too much drinking and the painful consequences afterwards. Instead he talks about how realistic dreams can often influence your mood the following day.

You kind of get the feeling that Keith Brown has a beef with soap exceptions when he writes that SoapException Sucks. I won’t rehash everything he says here, but the gist of his complaint is that when throwing an exception from within a web service, the exception gets wrapped by a SoapException. What’s so bad about that? As Keith relates, the Message property of the SoapException class intersperses your fault string with a load of other crap you really don’t care about. Also, the InnerException doesn’t get serialized into the SOAP fault packet, so it is always null on the client side.

Wohoo! The little lady and myself will be in attendance as we watch Zinedine Zidane, Beckham, Ronaldo, Owen, Roberto Carlos and the rest of Real Madrid completely overpower and dismantle the lackluster Galaxy when they play an exhibition game at the Home Depot Center in Carson.

Steven Clarke has an interesting post about the usability (or lack thereof) of the Factory Pattern.

Doctors find dead fetus in a boy.

If you’re a fan of NPR and KCRW, make sure your voice is heard. The House will soon vote on budget cuts for public broadcasting and the issue is being painted as a liberal vs conservative battle.

Dare may singlehandedly be responsible for delaying Longhorn, VS.NET 2005, Yukon and many other products as legions of programmers (Microsoft and otherwise) lose productivity by spending their time playing DHTML Lemmings, a faithful javascript reproduction of the classic game Lemmings.

You know what, I do want to express myself, okay. And I don’t need 37 pieces of flair to do it.

From the Lessig blog I learned that Microsoft is releasing its spec for “Simple Feed Extensions” under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, often referred to as a “CopyLeft” . People are free to modify and redistribute the spec so long as the modifications are licensed under a similar license.

Now repeat after me, “RSS is designed to be extended.”

Just curious if any of my fantastic readers (or Google searchers, welcome. Nothing but love for ya) have experience with using Quickbooks Online. If so, let me know in the comments what your experience with it has been. Thank you.

I’ve been intentionally quiet about how Subtext is progressing (apart from a couple minor posts on how to obtain the code via CVS). My reticense is certainly not from lack of excitement or enjoyment of the project. Working on Subtext has been about the most enjoyable software development project I’ve ever had the pleasure to work on. So much so, that I’ve fallen a bit behind on my “real” work. Unfortunately this has caught up to me as I now have two projects with a potential third not far behind to work on (Yes, I know. A good problem to have, so quitcher belly-aching). This is very exciting for me as it may herald the beginning of a company. But it also means I need to slow down on Subtext a bit.

Anybody out there use a geolocation service they are happy with?